


Show Me Your Shadows

by YouLookGoodInLeather



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: BDSM, Choking, Dark!Azriel, Dubious Consent, F/M, Mental Health Issues, Sexual Violence, Sub!Elain, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Violent Sex, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-29
Updated: 2017-04-29
Packaged: 2018-10-25 11:15:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10763139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouLookGoodInLeather/pseuds/YouLookGoodInLeather
Summary: Azriel has demons stitched into his bones, which Elain thinks is really quite romantic.





	Show Me Your Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> If you are easily triggered, this is NOT the fic for you.

Of course, Azriel knew Mor was gay from the beginning. Wasn’t that obvious? They had saved one another from their own personal living hells; naturally, they told one another everything. The first night, when he had saved her, let her bathe and dry and dress, she had curled up next to him and cried; Cried, and told him that the worst part was that just the idea of fucking a man made her sick. That they had done all this all because they had found her with a woman.

Yet when he falls in love - an act he cannot stop, no matter how much distance he forces between them - there is always remnants of a masochistic kind of hope. Because maybe he’ll be the only exception? Maybe it doesn’t matter, so long as he is the one closest to her, there for her. So what if they do not touch and kiss and fuck as his mind imagines from the shadows, so long as he can be there for her (this is a lie: it is all okay so long as she is always there for him. He knows, somewhere, tucked and gagged in the back of his mind, that he would have disintegrated long ago without her).

It is selfish and ugly and a sick act of scratching the scab of a festering wound so it can never, ever heal, but oh how he _loves_ it.

And then it all falls apart.

All too fast and all too publically, he watches as Mor, perfect, brilliant Mor, is spirited away by Nesta. They are two sides of the same coin, fire meeting fire and growing all the stronger for it. Soon, Mor no longer needs to dote on him and humor him, for she has Nesta to support, to pour her energy into. She’s always been that way, a giver, a woman so filled with light and strength that it was easy to latch onto.

Like this, as he thinks about it, it all sounds so cruel. It wasn’t like that - he loved Mor as a friend and as a woman, he respected her and admired her and would have lived and died by her side without requesting anything.

Yet now there’s poison in the water. He has to watch her be so very happy without him, and now every time he returns from torturing their enemies, she is absent. No more welcomes, no more hours spent shouldering the burdens of his duties. Nesta has freed her, but left him in a state of vertigo as his supports are cut and crushed.

And as he disintegrates, there she is. The girl all too eager to drown in him. Who does not see the way his hands ball into fists at the slightest disruption, who does not see how everything must be in control. She thinks he’s gentle. She thinks he’s a _gentleman_.

“Oh Elain,” he whispers, after the first time they fuck, up against a wall hard and dirty and it’s her first time and she cries, but cries after that it’s so so good. “You know so little of the world.” He does not mean to be unkind. In fact, he thinks he might be trying to warn her.

But she looks back at him, wide eyed and yearning. “So _teach_ me.”

*

And teach he does. When he returns from beating monsters bloody, from gouging secrets from his brethren, he brings them back to her. At first he shares only the gist, avoiding details, yet each night they fuck pulls her deeper. She wants to know more. She wants to picture him, indulging his demons.

It’s a game to her, at first. To learn the secrets of the world. And he shows her the pretty ones first; which spots upon her supple skin will send her wild with ecstasy, how to touch herself just _so_ that she does not ever again need man or woman to arouse her. Yet the darker ones slip through the cracks, in the scraping of his fingernails, the names he calls her as he climaxes. She learns the two come together, and instead of cowering away like he expects it, she falls all the deeper.

The others think them chaste and sweet as they skirt around one another in the daylight. It excites her, playing the game of play pretend - she has let people view her as a child for so long, and now that she is blossoming, there’s thrill in its secrecy. For him, it provides time to plan, indulge, and fantasise. It takes long hours for the cold, quiet rage seated in his stomach to overcome his good sense and morals, to convince him that when evening falls he should pin her to the wall and choke her breathless.

She loves it. She drinks it up and the moment she is freed she cries and thanks him and pines for again, again, again. “Show me,” she says, as she does so often now, often when they are entwined, her fingers stroking his skin in admiration. Outside of fucking, he rarely touches her. “I want to know your shadows.”

It’s become her little ‘thing’ to refer to what they do as his shadows. All part of the game, it seems, for she giggles about it. And it stays that way for a while, just games and play as Azriel adjusts to handling her, to letting Mor go and regaining his autonomy. Or so he likes to think. It’s hard to feel in control the week Elain goes away.

She vanishes to the Spring Court, sent to retrieve Feyre in a tricksy plan of pretend trade, playing on Lucien’s mating bond. And Azriel is left with a week of no enemies to interrogate, and no soft body to dominate when the itch beneath gets all too much. It is intolerable. He realises he needs her, and despises himself for it. Nor can he turn to Mor or Rhys or Cass or any of them, for what would they think of him if they knew that buried deep within his muscles and his bones is the unquenchable urge to destroy everyone around him, to own everyone and everything so that he never can be hurt again?

They all pretend to be monsters, and despise it. So he knows already what they would think were they to discover he was one.

Only Elain welcomes it, embraces it, encourages it. Her childish innocence thinks it’s all a game. But that week, it becomes a game no longer.

*

The night she returns, he takes her to his bedroom and for the first time there is blood. She is so wrecked by the end of it that she is incoherent, mumbling and babbling to herself like a lunatic. He looks down at his hands, the blood staining his fingers. Breathes heavily. The itch is scratched, but not eradicated. He has to do something _more_.

And so it builds, like a nightmare crescendo. He is more violent with her than he has ever been on the battlefield, shoving and restraining and choking. More often than not she loses the ability to speak halfway through, eyes glazed, slack jawed, murmuring nonsense. Her lapse into subspace becomes longer and longer, until the line between daylight and night behaviour becomes blurred, then dissolves entirely.

She follows him around the Court like a puppy, all moon eyes and submissive and yes sir, of course sir. Azriel sees Lucien watch on in abject horror, unable to comprehend what he is witnessing. A long numbed part of him even feels sorry for him, feels disgusted by what he has allowed this affair to become. But the itch is stronger.

No longer an itch, it’s become a burning, a kinetic energy locked beneath his skin urging him to throw himself at Elain and unleash it all upon her. Fucking her into bed sheets, against walls and floors and desks, squeezing and tugging her tits and nipples, these are the only times he feels like he can breathe. It’s how he copes. It’s the only way he can survive.

And she does not turn and leave him. She cannot harm him, that much is obvious, and he revels in it. She obeys him completely, takes whatever he throws at her. Were she still human, she’d long be dead. Her smile is drunken, high on the adrenaline of allowing the abuse. Azriel knows it has crossed some kind of line, slipped from ill-advised temptations to something that is changing them both for the worse.

Yet he cannot stop it.

They both give into one another. And finally, he has a companion in the shadows.


End file.
